Patrick Lawrence: Zelensky’s Misadventures in Kursk
It has been three weeks since ground units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine crossed into the Kursk province in southwestern Russia, surprising — or maybe not surprising — the U.S. and its clients in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Two days later, the AFU began artillery and drone attacks in Belgorod, a province just south of Kursk. It has been a little more than a week since explosions at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, which lies in what is now Russian territory along the Dnipro River, ignited a fire in one of the plant’s two cooling towers. All six reactors are now in cold shutdown.
In the still-to-be-confirmed file, BelTA, the Belarusian news agency, reported last weekend that Ukraine has amassed significant forces along the Belarus–Ukraine border. Aleksandr Lukashenko, the Belarusian president, put the troop count at an improbable 120,000. Further out in speculative territory, RT International reported at the weekend that the AFU is “preparing a nuclear false flag—an explosion of a dirty atomic bomb,” targeting nuclear-waste storage sites at the Zaporozhye plant. RT cited “intelligence received by Russia” and a military correspondent and documentarian named Marat Khairullin.
Hmmm.
When I began my adventures in the great craft at the New York Daily News long years ago, two of the better shards of wisdom I picked up were, “Go with what you’ve got” and “When in doubt, leave it out.” Let us proceed accordingly as we consider Ukraine’s latest doings in the proxy war it wages. I will leave aside the BelTA and RT International reports pending further developments, but with this caveat: Amassing units along the Belarus border would be entirely in keeping with the AFU’s recent forays into Russian territory. As for the imminence of a dangerous false flag op at the Zaporozhye plant, I would not put it past a regime that has acted recklessly and irrationally on numerous occasions in the past.
Why, we are left to ask of what we know to be so, did the AFU send troops, tanks, artillery, drone units, and assorted matériel into Kursk on Tuesday, Aug. 6? And then the ancillary operation in Belgorod? Everyone wondered this at first—supposedly everyone, anyway. This is our question, and I will shortly get to the “supposedly.”
On the eve of the incursion, Kiev was losing ground steadily to a new Russian advance in eastern Ukraine. Critically short of troops, the Ukrainian forces are, indeed, about to lose a tactically significant town, Pokrovsk, on their side of the Russian border. The thought that the AFU would sustain and expand its Kursk operation to bring the war to Russian territory in any effective way is prima facie preposterous. What was the point? Where is the strategic gain?
In his speech Monday evening at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago, Joe Biden defended his proxy war in Ukraine as a just war waged in the name of democracy and liberty. Oh? setting aside the emptiness of this characterization, the question remains. What is the point as the Kursk operation continues? The AFU now holds one Russian town and six villages, according to the latest reports, which also indicate they have set about destroying bridges critical to Russian supply lines. But where to from here? I do not see a sensible answer.
There is no question the Russians were caught off guard when the AFU crossed into the border village of Sudzha and proceeded with evidently little initial resistance further into Russian territory. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have been evacuated; the governor of Belgorod quickly declared a state of emergency after the drone and artillery strikes of Aug. 14.
But we cannot count this as any kind of astute strategic move. I do not pretend to have an inside read as to Russia’s apparent intelligence failure or what looks like its flat-footed response. But I do not think we can correctly mark down events to date to the AFU’s superior strength or the Russians’ weakness or incompetence. Western correspondents are having a fine old time reporting that klutzy, clumsy Moscow is once again stumbling, but I buy none of it. In my view this is probably another case of Russian restraint: The AFU is using U.S. — and NATO — supplied weapons, and the Kremlin has all along been acutely sensitive to the risk of escalation against Kiev’s Western sponsors.
Ukraine has “changed the narrative,” corporate media accounts report with evident approval. The incursion marks a “dramatic shift” in the war’s direction, The New York Times reported Aug. 15. The reliably unprofessional Anton Troianovski reported in the same day’s editions that Ukraine’s incursion “flips the script on Putin” (and if I read that odious phrase once more I’m calling the Coast Guard). We get one useful point out of all this wishful thinking, spin, and distortion: In large measure, this folly is indeed about scripts, appearances, display, stories.
My conclusion: No one’s script has flipped. This operation is likely to be working upside-down to what we are reading in corporate media. The best explanation they have come up with so far is that Kiev’s plan was to draw Russian forces away from the front on the Ukrainian side of the border. That has plainly not happened, however much The Times indulges in denial on this point. “And now Moscow has begun withdrawing some troops from Ukraine in an effort to repel Kyiv’s offensive into western Russia, Constant Méthuet reported Aug. 14 — before adding “according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.” Crapulous journalism. Simply crapulous. There is no evidence of this whatsoever—only of further Russian gains as noted above.
Inversely, the Kursk adventure required a lot of Ukrainian units to get going and more now to sustain. It is Kiev that is wasting resources on what is bound to end in retreat. The Russian military has not marshaled anything approaching its full force. This is likely to end when Moscow decides it should, and in the meantime the Russians appear to wage the same wearing war of attrition that has reduced the AFU to something close to a desperate force on the home front.
The initial press reports of the Kursk adventure had it that top officials in Washington were caught entirely by surprise and were as perplexed as the rest of us as to the “Why?” of the thing. I do not accept this at face value, either. The Times ran a lengthy report on the Ukrainians’ preparations, featuring residents in the towns bordering Kursk remarking for weeks about the buildup of AFU units and matériel before the operation began. Russian intelligence took note, The Times also reported. And the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and the administration were all taken by surprise? To quote an East European emigre I knew in the old days, “Gimme break.”
Not long prior to the incursion, the Biden regime had given Kiev dispensation to use U.S.–made weapons against Russian targets so long as these were deployed in self-defense and against military targets. And the only reason the U.S. is at all interested in Ukraine, we must remind ourselves—forget about freedom and democracy, for heaven’s sake—is for its use in prosecuting the West’s long, varied campaign to subvert “Putin’s Russia.” This remains the ultimate objective. In the matter of Washington’s hand in directing the Zelensky regime from one adventure to another, Biden’s national security people wear more fig leaves than you find on a tree in Tuscany.
At the same time, we have to allow for divided opinions among the policy cliques in Washington—factions, in a word. While the U.S. almost certainly had advance knowledge of the Kursk incursion and, tacitly or otherwise, may have approved it, there are indications some officials think Volodymyr Zelensky has outgrown his usefulness to the Biden regime—which has, after all, nursed a long-running dislike of the Kiev regime’s president as obstructionist, difficult to work with, excessively corrupt even by the Biden regime’s standards, and a clod in matters of statecraft.
The Washington Post reported Aug. 17 that the Kursk operation, among its other consequences, scotched a plan for Ukrainian and Russian delegations to meet in Qatar this month to negotiate a partial ceasefire covering strikes on energy and power-related infrastructure. The shared hope was that these talks would amount to an opening to a more comprehensive settlement. While factions in Washington have for months sought to move the Ukraine crisis toward the mahogany table, this proposition is now dead. Not to simplify the case, but the Biden regime has, in effect, another Netanyahu on its hands.
Stephen Bryen, formerly a senior Defense Department official who now publishes a newsletter called Weapons and Strategy—and who is of decidedly right-wing persuasions, let us note—wrote a column Aug. 13 speculating (informed speculation but speculation) that the U.S. and its European allies plan to begin a campaign to discredit Zelensky and replace him. There is no certainty here, but I have no trouble thinking this may be so. Zelensky’s replacement, Bryen writes, would be Arsen Avakov, who previously served as Kiev’s interior minister and has strong ties with Ukrainian intelligence, the AFU’s powerful neo–Nazi elements and various European leaders.
This is an interesting combination of connections if it is in fact the case. Avakov would thus be in a position to talk to the West—instead of Zelensky’s artless harping and barking—and keep a lid on radical Russophobes in the military once negotiations begin. Knowing the plumbing inside Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus would also be an advantage, given its prominence within the Ukrainian state.
Here is Bryen on all this, citing SVR, Moscow’s foreign intelligence service:
One of the reasons the West wants to dump Zelensky, according to the SVR, is his unwillingness to negotiate with Russia unless many preconditions are accepted, including a full withdrawal of the Russian army from Ukrainian territory. Actually, Zelensky’s conditions on any deal with Russia align quite well with Azov and other far-right organizations …
Bryen’s piece, while there is much in it that is unconfirmed, brings me to my mad-dog theory of the odious Zelensky and why he is authorizing the Kursk operation, the sabotage at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, and whatever else Kiev may be getting up to. (And let us not bother once again with the silliness that Russia is responsible for shelling the plant as it occupies it.) Zelensky is a desperate man. The war is lost, martial law has made him deeply unpopular — Ukrainians are beginning to protest as army recruiters kidnap draft-age men from the streets — and the West, as is well-known, is losing faith in the AFU’s war. Not to be missed, the Biden regime just announced an additional $20 billion in arms shipments to Zionist Israel. Among other things, Zelensky needs to show the West that the AFU remains alive enough to merit more billions in money and matériel. Where’s my money? he frets.
Maybe Zelensky wants some Russian real estate as a bargaining advantage in negotiations with Russia he has come to accept as inevitable. It is possible but does not fit with his adamant insistence that the full restoration of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, is non negotiable — a precondition to any diplomacy. And as in Netanyahu’s case, a settlement would put his political future greatly in doubt.
In any case, Zelensky chose badly when the AFU crossed into Russian territory at Kursk. The Red Army’s defeat of the Wehrmacht at Kursk, in 1943, was the largest battle in the history of warfare and left roughly 1.7 million Russians dead, wounded, or missing. Along with Stalingrad, it marked a decisive moment in the Allied victory over the Reich. Russians do not forget this kind of thing, especially when German weapons are part of the AFU’s arsenal. The thought of Ukrainian troops and tanks holding Kursk is another of the miscalculations that litter the story of this war since it began with the U.S.–inspired coup 10 years ago.
